Animating with Blender

Hair

Applying the Soft Body simulator to strand-based hair allows it to bounce and move realistically with the character’s animation. In my own experiments, simulation times with collision enabled once you near or pass a thousand strand parents becomes a little too high for the feature to be useful. The problem isn’t the final round of calculations before the rendering, but the difficulty in tweaking and tuning such a system. Five minutes to bake a 50 frame simulation is certainly usable, but only if you have an entire day to devote to running the simulation 30 or 40 times while you try to get it right.

If your characters have long hair that is going to be whipping in the wind, flowing, and trying to wrap itself around both the character and ...